Communication devices such as smartphones, netbooks, gaming devices, tablets, netbooks, PDAs, and laptop computers are now ubiquitous. And the capabilities of these communication devices have developed to a level that enables these communication devices to intercommunicate in a peer-to-peer manner.
For example, peer-to-peer communication is now used in connection with gaming (e.g., multi-player gaming), social networking (e.g., users may exchange messages), groupware applications (e.g., information may be synchronized and shared among ad-hoc groups without an external network), proximity based services (information may be broadcast to communication devices when within close proximity), and media entertainment (e.g., remote control and game control).
In many instances, each of a collection of people in a group social setting (e.g., a road trip, barbecue, party, or other social gathering) have a communication device that includes stored content (e.g., music, images, videos, and other types of files) that may be of interested to other people in the group. Although a particular communication device may be connected to a presentation device (e.g., audio amplifier or audiovisual display) to present content that is stored on that particular communication device it is, at best, inconvenient for content stored on other communication devices in the group to be presented on the presentation device.
For example, in the context of a social setting in which people are listening to music from a single audio device (e.g., a sound system) a first communication device may be streaming music from its memory to the audio device via a local connection (e.g., WiFi or Bluetooth), but the other people in the group cannot stream music from their communication devices to the audio device, if at all, without the first communication device being disconnected so another communication device may be connected to the audio device.
Moreover, each of the people on the group is unaware of the content that the other people in the group have on their devices. For example, people at a social gathering do not know what types of music other people have stored on their communication devices. As a consequence, current peer-to-peer communication techniques are often less than ideal and will almost certainly be unsatisfactory in the future.